If you haven’t read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Case for Reparations, do that. Or watch this:
Here’s the question, though, for any supporter of reparations: How do we make it happen? As Coates points out in his article, a bill to establish a reparations commission by progressive stalwart John Conyers has gone nowhere, for decades. And in the interview, he seems pessimistic that reparations will happen any time soon, given how rare it is in history for nations to reckon with their foundational sins and correct them. The country’s first black president is on record as opposing them.
However, there’s reason to think this might be the right historical moment. Namely, the unprecedented and unanimous call by the heads of fifteen of our neighbors to the immediate south, for reparations.
Don Rojas at The Nation reports:
It was almost surreal, improbable just a few years ago: a room filled with presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers from the fifteen-nation Caribbean Community (CARICOM), all listening with rapt attention, several nodding in agreement, as Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, one of the region’s most distinguished academics, and perhaps the Caribbean’s most prominent public intellectual, gave a riveting report on the recent work of CARICOM’s Reparations Commission, which he leads…
There was applause at the end of the professor’s report. Not a single dissenting voice was heard from a group of leaders whose politics ranged from conservative through liberal to progressive. The CARICOM heads of government then proceeded to unanimously adopt a ten-point program for reparatory justice for the region.
This breakthrough plan calls for a formal apology for slavery, debt cancellation from former colonizers and reparation payments to repair the persisting “psychological trauma” from the days of plantation slavery.
Racial injustice is intricately entwined with economic inequality, which President Obama has called a defining challenge, Rojas points out. “The so-called pragmatists who argue that the question of reparations is impractical, unachievable, utopian, a waste of time and energy,” he says, “are those who are ignorant of the moral power of a cause whose time has come.”
Firmly in favor of studying/implementing reparations. My basic thought is a 30-year blitz of investment in education, career retraining, capital improvements in black neighborhoods, preference/subsidy to minority-owned businesses for that and other work, and free in-state college tuition over that period.
Further, I propose we obtain all funds required for the project by raising the property tax of Blabby and Todd Mecklem.
Give money to people who were never slaves by forcibly stealing it from people who never owned them. Great plan.
It’s been pointed out that since the Fed is already printing a shitload of money to buy bonds (which is a good thing!) it could instead print a shitload of money and give it to people who were never slaves but nonetheless suffered from constant theft and discrimination and terrorism since the abolition of slavery.
@ Spindles, it’s called “representative democracy,” not robbery.
Also, if it helps, think of it more as an investment than straight redistribution. Think how many middle class jobs the various projects and their administration would generate for people (of all races), and then consider how those workers and their middle and upper class children will contribute to the tax base for generations into the future.
@Spindles: Thanks for proving that you clearly did not read the referenced article.
An investment is something you do voluntarily. Coercing someone to give you money, and if you don’t you ultimately get black clad guy’s with machine guns kicking down your door, is robbery. Even if you wear good guy badges and fancy hats.
Say, isn’t our “representative democracy” kind of the reason why slavery was allowed to exist in the first place?
@Spindles, I don’t know why I’m encouraging it, but I’m morbidly curious about your “argument.”
Please describe a viable system of governing 300 million people that operates fiscally on the “pay only what you feel like” model.
So are they going to go track down the ancestors of the tribes in Western Africa that traditionally took slaves during combat and decided to trade them to the Portuguese and other Europeans for a profit?
Furthermore, does this mean I should keep burning churches until the Roman Catholic church coughs up coin for disrupting the way of life of my pagan ancestors?
Let’s just make a compromise and give them a couple of casinos on unoccupied pieces of land outside small vacation towns.
It’s called Voluntaryism. It’s an age old political philosophy based on the application of the non-aggression principle (the non-initiation of force) and that all forms of human association should be voluntary. It’s become a whole lot more popular lately, thanks to just how blatant the over-reach of the state has become.
Would it be practical tomorrow? Probably not, considering how ingrained the state has become into every facet of human interaction. But it’s a more moral proposition than one that encourages the extortion of one party to provide resources to another on behalf of an action neither party had any involvement with.
I’ll tell you what, the American institution of slavery couldn’t have been upheld for as long as it did without the heavy subsidization of the government – providing the manpower and cost necessary to round up any slave who tried to escape the plantation – as even the Northern States did well into the Civil War.
So does it require 100% agreement to levy taxes or pass laws of any kind? How are laws enforced, if not ultimately by coercion? What happens if people commit violent crimes?
What if the children of Fantasyland’s unified front of voluntarists decide that some of the taxes and laws their parents ratified are dumb and they don’t particularly want to pay or follow them, but they also don’t particularly want to leave Fantasyland or otherwise give up the many benefits of Fantasyland citizenship?
“It’s become a whole lot more popular lately, thanks to just how blatant the over-reach of the state has become.”
I’d love to see your sources on that.
While living in Germany, I always felt bad for the youth there, having to live with the sins of their grandparents over WW2 and the slaughter of Jews.
I’ll be damned if I am made to feel responsible, morally or finacially, for being born white here.
I find this whole discussion, at this point in time, laughable – at best.
Ironic it is happening at a time when our President is black too.
I don’t know how folks promoting this can do so with a straight face.
Further, Coates appealing to all of us, hat in hand, for a handout, is something I find deeply shameful in him.
I’m glad that our President, who I am a big supporter of, has never pandered in such a lowly way.